What was your first computer?

A Dragon 32 (without any of the fancy equipment save a joystick) and a ZX Spectrum+, which really does sound like a 1970s idea of a model name from the future :smiley:

First computer was a VIC20.

First PC was a Tandy PC clone, 486 SX 25 MHz, 1 MB RAM, 110 MB HD.

The one and only: OSBORNE 1 !!!

Z80 running CP/M
2 (count em !) 5.25" floppy drives
(whopping) 64 K RAM
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.
.
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and built-in 3" CRT.

Still have it, still believe it runs.

(Warmed my heart to see one in the Smithsonian some years ago)

1988 Vendex Headstart Turbo 888-XT, with 20 meg hard drive, running an 8088, with two 5 1/4 floppy drives, running at up to 8 MHz. Endorsed by pro wrestler “King Kong” Bundy! It used DOS 3.0, IIRC.

Damn, I was a command line warrior back then!

The one I learned to program on -LGP-21. 4K of rotating memory, one accumulator, did not implement ASCII. No assembler on the one in my high school until I wrote one myself.

The first one I owned was a C64, but I had used a dozen at least by then. When I went to the Computer Museum in Mountain View I had intimate knowledge of way too many of their exhibits. When I retire I’m going to volunteer to help program their PDP-1, which I used for my undergrad assembler class - the very one at MIT where Spacewar was invented.

Depends on the acception of “your”.

The first computer ever in our household was a swanky 8086 “laptop”, no hard drive, monochrome orange screen built into the case. It looked like a big oscilloscope, with a hinged keyboard. And it played Zaxxon and Digger. It was stonking great.

The first PC I actually owned and paid for myself was a Dell Pentium 90.

The first I used was an Apple //e. The first I owned myself was a Mac SE/30 which was a hand-me-down and was quite old when I got it. The first I bought myself was an eMac.

First computer(s) used;
Friend’s Commodore VIC-20 with cassette drive
School lab; Apple IIe, Apple IIc, TRS-80 Model 1, Model 3, and Color Computer (CoCo), Apple Macintosh 128K
Parents purchased; Commodore 64, Apple Macintosh Performa 600CD (33Mhz Motorola 68030 IIVx without math coprocessor)
Purchased by me; PowerMac 7100/66

A commodore Amiga 500. We still have it somewhere.

My parents cashed in their 401k to buy a Leading Edge (I think it was Model D) with the amber monochrome monitor. For some reason, everyone thought amber was soooo much better than green monochrome. Real classy like.

I still remember having to boot up DOS every time you turned it on. It was a big deal when some computer geek my sister was dating gave us a RBG monitor. It was like coming out of the dark ages.

EDIT: Looking at Wikipedia, I remember we had the dual floppy disk drives. “The floppy disk model had two 360 KB drives, so that the user could run MS-DOS programs on the primary drive and work with files on the secondary drive.” Good times!

The first I used was an early Apple in junior high (about 1982). The first we got at home was a TRS-80 with a cassette and a dot matrix printer with a 3-4 inch wide paper strip. The funny thing is, just about a week ago my mom handed me a bunch of papers with some programs I had written in BASIC in 1983. Apparently she found them in the basement somewhere.

Our first family computer was an IBM PCjr. What a hunk of junk. It was in the shop every other week for repairs. We played endless hours of Jumpman on it though.

TRS-80 Model III. 48k RAM, two 5 1/4" disk drives. Taught myself BASIC on that machine, with some tutorial programs, when I was a kid.

By that definition the first I owned was an anonymous P100.

Mine was a PCjr. Complete with cartridge slots for stuff like BASIC. And the infrared remote half-keyboard that needed new AA batteries all the time. I never did get the stinking 10MB hard-drive attachment that mounted on the top and side. Held onto it long after my friends all had 486’s or even Pentiums. I think my sister still has it. Og knows if it works.

(I also had a Timex Sinclair 1000, with 16KB expansion memory pack and cassette tape drive. The less said about that one, the better.)

My school had an Apple II when I was in sixth grade ('79 or '80), but only a handful of students were allowed to use it, chosen by teachers. I was not among those chosen. I was able to play with one in middle school once or twice though (Swashbuckler). Our family got a VIC-20 for Christmas in about '81 or '82. We had a tape drive and a six-pack of games for it on cassette.

I bought my first PC from the owner of the hardware store I worked at, it was a 286 (HP maybe) with 256KB of memory, 40MB HDD, 3 1/2" & 5 1/4" floppy drives and a color monitor. I eventually added a 1200 baud modem and a Prodigy account.

AFAIK, I bought the very last Tandy 1000–a 1000 RL on clearance–sold by Radio Shack in northern Virginia. It was what the PCjr should have been.

I was in 8th Grade when my school finally got computers, the last one in the district to do so. The district went with Apple II; I think e.

We didn’t have a computer at home until four years later when Dad bought a Commodore 64 system. Ostensibly for him to use as a word processor but we could never get it to work with the electric typewriter that was supposed to double as a printer. The monitor died years ago but I still have the rest, even though two of the keys are missing.

First one I ever used was a Commodore PET - the early one with the chiclet keyboard and that horrible futuristic font on the keys.

First one we owned was a Timex Sinclair ZX81 that my dad and I soldered together from a kit. It had that awesome flat-panel keyboard with five (!) functions per key. Real joy to type on.

My life in machinery:

TRS 80 Model II - learned BASIC on it.
IBM AT - first modem connected machine.
Macintosh 128 - found that you could DO things with computers!
Apple ][c at school - learned PASCAL
WYSE terminal hooked up to the Tragedies (mainframes at school) - learned LISP and Prolog
Mac SE / SE30 / II Ci - carried me through school as I ran away from programming.

Now - just a series of different PC laptops as I make my money telling others what to do. I miss the joy of those first 3 machines - truly discovering new things to do, rather than just incremental changes.

I did not return to that discovery feel until I picked up my first iPhone - something truly new and different.

The first one I used (at elementary school) was a TRS-80, quickly followed but various macs at school. First one at home was a mac.